Update on the spam email study

A few days ago I reported on the spam email that I received from two business school professors (one at Columbia)! As noted on the blog, I sent an email directly to the study’s authors at the time of reading the email, but they have yet to respond.

This surprises me a bit. Certainly if 6300 faculty each have time to respond to one email on this study, the two faculty have time to respond to 6300 email replies, no? I was actually polite enough to respond to both of their emails! If I do hear back, I’ll let youall know!

P.S. Paul Basken interviewed me briefly for a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the now-notorious spam email study. Basken’s article is reasonable—he points out that (a) the study irritated a lot of people, but (b) is ultimately no big deal.

One interesting thing about the article is that, although some people felt that the spam email study was ethical, nobody came forth with an argument that the study was actually worth doing.

P.P.S. In all seriousness . . . everyone makes mistakes. Heck, I’m a full professor of statistics but I published a false theorem once. And the notorious Frank Flynn is a professor of business at Stanford, so I’m sure he’s done a lot of great stuff. I also imagine the designers of the spam email survey have a lot of good ideas in them: they’re young researchers and they made a silly mistake, it’s ultimately no big deal.

8 thoughts on “Update on the spam email study

  1. Professor of usiness, eh? is that like truthiness? I guess it would mean he walks around with a cup of coffee a lot, or sits at his computer writing emails.

    Hm.

    (sorry for picking up on a typo, but it was replete with possibilities)

  2. The study did not send out spam, it sent out a relatively small number (compared with spam numbers) of unsolicited emails that had no commercial intent. A spam filter that marked this as spam would have been broken. I'm not surprised that no-one argued that this is important research — in my experience, academics tend to behave like anyone else outside of one's own field and be pretty dismissive of academic work.

  3. "he points out that (a) the study irritated a lot of people, but (b) is ultimately no big deal."

    That's pretty rich, given how high a horse you found yourself on in your case.

  4. David: How many unsolicited emails does it take for something to be "spam"? 6300 sounds like a lot to me.

    Jme: This is just a blog, it's not the New York Times. I report on lots of things here that are "ultimately no big deal." Nonetheless, I still found the researchers' practices to be inappropriate. Think of a two-dimensional space, with "inappropriateness/annoyingness" on one dimension, and "no-big-deal-ness" on the other. Perhaps there's a third dimension, which you allude to: the height of my horse. Points can fall in all sorts of places on these three dimensions. Wasting the time of 6300 people without asking for permission is bad behavior, I think, even if it's no big deal.

  5. Rereading my comment, it's brevity may have been mistaken for snarkiness, which was only mildly intended.

    My complete opinion would be that I can certainly see how someone would be (significantly) annoyed by such a study. I just don't think that I would be, personally. What seemed off to me was that the level of anger you expressed in your original post seemed out of proportion to the harm done.

    That said, I think my disagreement is a matter of opinion that will totally differ from person to person. Personally, I would have spent a few moments being annoyed and then simply went on with my life.

    In that context, I think a more reasonable way to frame your complaint is along these lines: "I wanted to let you know that while some people may not mind having their time wasted/ schedule disrupted, I found it very annoying. I appreciate the need for research of this type, but I believe you need to find a way to do it that is more respectful of people who go out of their way to accomodate students asking for meetings, who may feel they were taken advantage of."

    What you wrote came off as very accusatory and somewhat threatening, with the undertone that what they had done was not just annoying but deeply unethical and merited a Very Serious Punishment.

    Maybe that's not quite what you meant, the internet being what it is and all. Anyway, obviously, I didn't think it was "that big a deal". ;)

  6. OK, I almost commented on the last entry that this was worth doing, but now you've challenged us, I will.

    I think this study was worth doing. Economists focus on how we spend our resources – mostly that's money, but another resource that's equally short in supply is how we spend our time. And we end up spending our time sub-optimally, because of this temporal bias. Understanding that might help people to spend their time more rationally.

    Since I first read about this sort of research, I am more aware of the temporal nature of time requests. The simplest example being two requests:

    "Do you have $100 that you don't need now?" Answer: "No"
    "Will you have $100 that you don't need in 3 months?" Answer: "No"

    "Do you have 2 hours spare time now?" Answer: "No"
    "Will you have 2 hours spare time in 3 months?" Answer: "Yes"

    I find myself wondering why I agree to requests that are three months in the future, and when they roll around, I won't have time and wondered why the hell I agreed to do it. This seems (to me) to be almost as interesting as Kahneman and Tversky's research on framing of decisions.

    On another note, I sometimes wonder if emails to mailing lists are some sort of bizarre experiment along these lines – are researchers actually sending inane emails, but varying the location, gender, name, or some other feature, to see what kinds of responses they get. (It would be hard to measure and balance the covariates in such a study though. But it also might be interesting.)

  7. David: I certainly didn't mean to imply that the researchers should be punished, just that they should compensate us for our time, given that we were not asked whether to participate. I don't think of a request for compensation as a punishment!

    Jeremy: I agree that the study could be interesting; I just don't think it was appropriate to get our free labor without asking for permission.

  8. It isn't a matter about what is "worth doing", it is a matter of ethics. Even if I could do my job better by constantly lying I would rather be honest and a little less productive.

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